Why one need to sort and rearrange so many pictures? Write some applications which can dynamically fetch and reaarange all pictures as yo imagine. May be place visited, date, time, looks like, may contain something like this etc.

As for me, I like to be parasatic for pictures. I remember my partner during the picturing. Praise him/her for their nice pictures and request to send me few of them when required. It works good for me.

Junko, I don't exist in Facebook so I don't have to worry about losing rights over my photo collection. One thing every one must do is to buy some cloud storage space and upload all pictures to it. Writing on DVD's & CD's are not always reliable, they degrade over time. I also keep backups on magnetic hard drives as immediately accessible storage.

But you raise a good quandary -with thousands of pictures taken yearly, does any one look at them often enough?

I have photos mostly on one computer and that computer is backed up regularly on a back up hard drive, but that's not optimum. I used to store them on CDs and then later DVDs. The problem is that there is currently no truely archival way to store digital media. With printed photos if you have the right paper and dyes, and you store them in a cool, dry, and dark place they can last for a 100 years. I can't think of anyplace in the digital world where I believe I can put my photos there today and they will still be there 100 years from now. What someone needs to invent is a truly archival (will last 100 years) physical device for storing digital data. Even the best of the so called "archival quality" DVDs are projected to last less than 40 years.

krisi, that's a damn good question. But I think I sort of knew the answer... here's what one of the law offices in New York says :(http://www.nyccounsel.com/business-blogs-websites/who-owns-photos-and-videos-posted-on-facebook-or-twitter/)

What happens when you decide to post that picture on the Internet – perhaps on Facebook or Twitter (using Twitpic), or some other social network or photo-sharing site?

You may be shocked to find out that once you post on these sites, that although you still "own" the photograph, you grant the social media sites a license to use your photograph anyway they see fit for free AND you grant them the right to let others use you picture as well! This means that not only can Twitter, Twitpic and Facebook make money from the photograph or video (otherwise, a copyright violation), but these sites are making commercial gain by licensing these images, which contains the likeness of the person in the photo or video (otherwise, a violation of their "rights of publicity").

@BobsView, that is really awesome! I know what you mean by: "The results are spectacular and convenient."

These digital photos we take these days really look great on a large-screen TV.

I do, often, take out my SD card from my camera and stick it into a slot of a large-screen TV at my mother's when I go back. I don't have a SD card slot in my Sharp TV in the U.S., though, unfortunately.

When I first went digital, from 35mm slides, I realized I needed a decent medium to view the photos. Although it was possible to view them on a computer screen, it was awkward whenever we wanted to show them to groups of friends and family.

So I purchased a 42 inch HDTV and a desktop computer in a small chassis. The computer video plugs right into the HDTV.

I store all my digital photos on the computer hard drive in folders organized from each trip. The camera was set up to the 16:9 aspect ratio so it fills the entire TV screen, not just the middle.

The results are spectacular and convenient. I can show any of our trips in seconds from the computer hard drive. It doesn't even require an Internet hookup although I also have one attached to the computer to view YouTube on the TV.

I probably have about 20,000 photos on the hard drive.

Talking about pictures in shoeboxes, my wife inherited about 6,000 old pictures when a relative passed away. Some were color but most were black and white. But the resolution of the B&W pictures was very good. The pictures contained the complete famility history of one side of her family.

She got the idea of scanning them all, then placed them on CD's and DVD's. She made a bunch of copies and mailed them to all her cousins. It took her about 6 months.

They really appreciated it. There were pictures there no one had ever seen, but now saved forever on multiple machines scatted over the USA.

Very interesting article...I am with most people, having tens of thousands pics dispersed on multiple machines and various accounts...not idea what to do with it, any suggestions how to organize that mess would be helpfu...while reading the text one question came to my mind: who own your pics on Facebook? you or them?

The digital age does seem to require more organizational skills. My music collection is also fairly fragmented now, with different songs on different machines and cloud services. It seems that it many ways things were simpler a few years ago.

I hear you, Dylan. I am terrible at organization so I actually leave it to my husband (who is also a cold-blooded, ruthless editor). He takes great photos; he actually still order prints (a luddite) and put them neatly in albums. I love him for that!

Meanwhile, I was once a big fan of smilebox -- where I can edit my photos, lay them out neatly and I could even add music and video to it. Loved it. But one thing led to another, I stopped using the service and recently I found that all those smilebox albums I created are NO LONGER available on smilebox.

Apparently I should have paid thema few more bucks to order it in print or CD. Who knew?

In conjunction with unveiling of EE Times’ Silicon 60 list, journalist & Silicon 60 researcher Peter Clarke hosts a conversation on startups in the electronics industry. One of Silicon Valley's great contributions to the world has been the demonstration of how the application of entrepreneurship and venture capital to electronics and semiconductor hardware can create wealth with developments in semiconductors, displays, design automation, MEMS and across the breadth of hardware developments. But in recent years concerns have been raised that traditional venture capital has turned its back on hardware-related startups in favor of software and Internet applications and services. Panelists from incubators join Peter Clarke in debate.